Pop quiz hotshot: The most violent games of all time?

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For better or worse, videogames are a violent medium. Sure, games like Flower offer splendid experiences and delightful visuals but the big sellers–Call of Duty, Halo, Left 4 Dead, and so on–are almost all violent. This isn’t something we at Geek.com necessarily embrace or decry, it’s just how things are. When the buying public wants something different, say putting garlands of around the necks of sparkling unicorns which you then ride to a magic castle by the sea overlooking Lollipop Island, that’s just what they’ll get.

Our sister publication, PC Mag, just put up a slideshow covering the most violent games of all time. They didn’t use any statistical analysis about liters of gore spilled, dimemberments per second, or even total body count, but they hit on the high points from 1992 up until 2010. Some of the picks were obvious, like Mortal Kombat and Postal, but some were a bit more surprising.

The list isn’t exhaustive though, so after you give it a once-over, leave a suggestion below that you think should have made it.

I’ll kick things off: NARC. This was a game that came out in 1988 and about the war on drugs, with the emphasis on war. You played as a cop named “Hit Man” who could arrest or mow down you enemies. Except your enemies were junkies who shot syringes at you while you tried to shoot them with your machine gun or, if things got tough, a rocket launcher. So as gory as some of today’s games might be, NARC had an unabashed violence that really took things to another level, way past something like Bulletstorm.

Speak Your Mind

Surely Carmaggedon should be on that list from ’97. Very bloody and violent. I’d put it in my top ten.

a_brit

Carmaggedon should definately be there.
Original GTA games with the “gouranga” message, got it a few times.

The defense by PC Mag of “this violence wasn’t just for the sake of violence” is a joke, of course it is. They can make the story any way they like and they made it rubbish. I cannot see anyone in the CIA justifying that act as for if it was ever discovered it could lead to military retaliation by Russia. Ridiculus.